Setting has always been a living character in Wes Anderson’s films–from the school in Rushmore to the tree houses of Fantastic Mr. Fox–and his new movie, out May 25, lives just as strongly inside its own world. “We were looking for a sort of naked wildlife,” he says. Moonrise Kingdom is about two 12-year-olds who fall in love and run away in the summer of 1965, and Anderson didn’t have the time to send scouts to every wilderness in America. So he did what everyone else does: “We literally used Google Earth,” he says. It took months to settle on a location.

Read the whole (very short) article, and see some Google Earth photos of the Moonrise Kingdom locale, here.